While Warner Bros is likely to do everything in their power to bring Nolan's pen to the contract, another question surrounding Batman 3 is whether the studio will make Nolan shoot the sequel in stereoscopic 3-D. Nolan admitted he's tired of the "3-D versus 2-D" debate.

I'm not a huge fan of 3-D. The truth is, I think it's a misnomer to call it 3-D versus 2-D. The whole point of cinematic imagery is it's three-dimensional. ... You know, 95% of our depth cues come from occlusion, resolution, color and so forth, so the idea of calling a 2-D movie a "2-D movie" is a little misleading.

The truth of it is when you watch a film in [a theater], you're looking at 16 foot-lamberts [the measurement of luminence projected in an average movie theater]. When you watch through any of the conventional 3-D processes you're giving up three foot-lamberts. A massive difference. You're not that aware of it because once you're "in that world," your eye compensates, but having struggled for years to get theaters up to the proper brightness, we're not sticking polarized filters in everything.

In other words, 3-D makes the movie image a little too dark for Nolan's taste. Nolan has said that a 3-D conversion was considered for his latest directorial effort, the thriller Inception.

We did tests on Inception with the different post-conversion processes, and they all went very well. It's quite easy to do, in fact. But it takes a little time, and we didn't have time to do it to the standards that I would be happy with.

It's all based on all the visual-effects technology, you know, that we're currently most engaged in with match moving, so forth, and rendering 2-D imagery into a 3-D space. ...On a technical level, it's fascinating, but on an experiential level, I find the dimness of the image extremely alienating.

I'm certainly quite pleased with Inception as presented — it's very bright and very clear, so as the technology improves, those differences may change, and that is what I hope for.

Nolan is a big fan of shooting movies in IMAX, having shot several sequences of The Dark Knight in the format, but that same preference doesn't translate to shooting a movie in 3-D.

There are a lot of problems with [shooting in 3-D]... the idea of shooting a whole film through a massive beam-splitter and so forth — there are enormous compromises. Post-conversion technologies probably, for me, are definitely the future, but really it is up to the audiences what they want to see and how they want to watch their films.

So it sounds like Nolan is at least open to shooting Batman 3 in 3-D, right?

Well, let me put it this way: There is no question if audiences want to watch films in stereoscopic imaging, that's what the studios will be doing, and that's what I'll be doing.

In other words, if Warner Bros. wants Batman 3-D, Nolan may be forced to oblige.